'somewhere against your anatomy,' blaine/kurt nc-17 (AU)

[threepwillow]

BEHOLD, THE FIC THAT HAS CONSUMED MY LIFE FOR THE PAST WEEK AND A HALF. jesus christ.

Yes, this is repo!AU Kurt/Blaine. No, I don't fucking know. But eh.


somewhere against your anatomy

i.
The gloss of the magazine is like a caress under his fingertips and he takes his sweet, precious time turning every beautiful page even though he almost feels like his own hands are not sweet enough to deserve to touch it. His gaze pores over the new releases, the razor-sharp commentary, and everything is so high-class and shining that he almost feels like his eyes are not wide enough to take it all in. That his thrilling, fluttering breath is too hot, and will curl the pages if he gets too close, and yet what a shame to keep it at arms' distance, what a waste. He wants to fall into the pages until he is beautiful, until he can stop feeling so acutely every flicker of physical imperfection that runs in his genes, in his very blood.

His father comes home.

"Kurt!" rings the voice, with that sharp hint of desperation it is always carried on.

"I'm still here," he barks back, and he stuffs the magazine back between his mattress and his boxspring, along with all the rest. His father will be up the stairs soon, and there can be no sign of them, not as long as -

Oh, but Kurt's eye catches on the issue from two weeks ago, the one he has coveted most of all. It is there, on the cover, worn so flawlessly by Kenton LaRoux. His hair is an unremarkable shade of avant-garde red, and his thick glasses are ironically retro-kitsch, but his skin, his skin, every square inch of it bared to the camera save for what's blocked by his electric neo-cello, and all of it simply swirls. It pulses, it shines, it is snow-white or ice-blue or lightning-yellow all at once. It's the most beautiful haute couture graft Kurt has ever laid eyes on, and no matter how many bracelets he has to break, no matter how much debt he has to enter into, before the season is out, it will be his. But for now he hears footsteps on the stair and throws himself stomach-down onto his bed, and picks at his fingernails.

"How's your day been, son?" asks his father, as he stands in the doorway to Kurt's room and wipes his hands on a rag long past the point of having seen better days.

Kurt's lips purse (not full enough to convey his disdain). "No different from usual," he says; and then acidly, "How was...work?"

His father frowns down at him with his ragged face. "No different from usual," he parrots back. "A few big successes today though, we might be able to afford that new TV soon after all."

"Whose kidneys are we buying this one with?"

"Kurt - "

"How much longer?" says Kurt, sitting upright to look his father in his gauche dull green eyes. "When is this over?"

"It's my job, Kurt - "

"When am I free?"

"I'm not having this fight with you again!" says his father. He throws the rag down onto Kurt's carpet; it will stain. "You know what I do. And you know who I do it to, Kurt. I don't care how the world makes you think you should look, I'm not letting you out there to get anything done to you that would ever have to make me come for you!" His fists clench, and one raises slightly to his mouth. It is Kurt's mouth, too, and he hates to watch it. "I am not coming for my own son."

"I'll pay in full," Kurt pleads, willing himself with all of his power not to cry for this, he will not cry for this. "There won't be any debt, Father, there won't be anything to collect!"

"The answer is no," he says. He lifts the rag from the floor, but his eyes stay locked with Kurt's, up until the moment where he leaves the room. The gaze burns hot into the back of his skull, just like the magazines burn hot into the skin of his thigh, through the mattress and the sheets and the blood-blue coverlet. His skin isn't cold enough.

ii.
Kurt has padded the crack under his father's door with a towel to muffle the sound. Kurt has oiled the hinges on the workshop door so they do not creak. Kurt has taken off his shoes. Now, here Kurt stands in his father's...workshop, looking for exactly what he needs.

He has heard them talk of the night surgeon, but Burt Hummel works repossessions in the daylight. Kurt often thinks this must be harder and easier all at once - that they can see him coming, of course, but also that they have no shadows to hide themselves in. He's not sure which he would prefer, himself. So now, at night, his father sleeps, and Kurt can sneak downstairs and break off his fourth (and final, final, it needs to be final) curfew-monitor bracelet. After the first one they stopped having keys. After the third one they stopped having motion. Now this one is woven straight through the top layer of skin on Kurt's right wrist in three distinct and treacherous places, and it will take all of Kurt's carefully-scavenged knowledge of surgery and scalpels, gleaned from his father's vocational musings or the gleaming pages of his magazines, to sever it from himself. And it will scar - his father knows it, and that's as big of a deterrent as anything. But it's not big enough.

Kurt finds what he's looking for in the wreck of his father's desk, in amidst transparencies documenting things he'd rather not know about and spilled substances he'd rather not be able to identify. The blade is thin and sharp, but it flexes ever-so-slightly, and Kurt can shimmy it in between his thick curfew cuff and his own pathetic skin with little struggle. No, the struggle will be the next part. Teeth clenched, and a thick scarf to staunch it with tucked in the crook of his elbow, Kurt holds his breath and pushes through the first connection.

The pain is fierce and staggering; he convulses, nearly screams. His blood flows more quickly than he'd anticipated and he almost can't do the second slice, or the third. His stomach is turning, his imperfect organs weak, too weak for this, always so inadequate, but finally the bracelet is loose and he can slide it up to mid-forearm and quell the bleeding with his trembling left hand. He makes sure to bleed on parts of the workshop that have already been bled on.

The hardest part is over.

When he's satisfied that his wrist will merely ooze instead of gushing, Kurt lifts the scarf away and examines the damage. It's hideous. He can barely look at it. The thought of having added to his own imperfections makes him furious. But soon, he swears to himself, soon, and so he twists his wrist just so, and tugs on the metal and plastic of the bracelet, and with the slick of the blood and the right clenching of his fingers it comes up over the heel of his hand and then pops off entirely.

Kurt rinses off in the bathroom sink and then reapplies the scarf.

He takes a thick, double-breasted sweater and a hugely-round pair of dark-tinted glasses from his wardrobe, and tries to make himself look presentable, like he at least has some idea of how he is supposed to look, even if he doesn't look that way, not yet.

He leaves the bracelet on the table beside his bed.

He climbs out the kitchen window.

iii.
It is the graveyard five bus-stops from his house where Kurt finally finds someone to follow. She's remarkably tall, enormous shoes making her even more so and her hair a brilliant blond in the pseudo-darkness of the city at night. He can see her sweat, her nervousness, and she strides like someone with a purpose but who knows that purpose is unsavory at best, ominous at worst. Either way, she knows where she's going, and Kurt falls in step behind her, back aways so she doesn't feel pursued but keeping her in his sight. He can tell as they get closer, because there are more and more people flowing the same direction, and by the time there's a pack of about six of them, he lets himself fall into it, holding himself as coolly as possible, trying not to look like he's never done this before.

Of course he doesn't succeed, though. "Haven't seen you here before," says a thick, coarse-voiced man, a few inches taller than Kurt with his hair shaved into a mohawk and about a million rings pierced through each ear. His arms are bare and Kurt can see sleek, barely-there trackmarks, the blue running under his skin just too artificial to be veins.

"I suppose I'm new," says Kurt. He extends his hand weakly for an introduction, but the other boy doesn't take it. They just keep walking, and they swell from six to ten, from ten to fifteen. Soon enough they're all crowding through a door and down a staircase to the basement of some old warehouse or other, pitch-dark except for a painfully bright bulb in one corner that flickers now and again and, here and there in the blackness, faint neon-blue whispers of what they've come for. The blonde girl at the front of the pack moans a little for it, her tongue sliding between her finely-crafted lips as if she can taste it on the air like a snake could. Zydrate.

There's a door in the corner where the lightbulb hangs and out of it steps a woman, swaggering heavy with confidence. From first sight Kurt can't decide if he likes her or not, and something in him understands somehow that this opinion of her will never change. She's wearing a long, thick coat with an extravagant feathered collar and next to nothing underneath, and she twirls a vial of Z in her fingers. Her skin is unfashionably dark, and Kurt wonders why someone of her status would leave it that way (but he thinks, suddenly, of his own misplaced fondness for the natural shape of his nose, and supposes he can't fault her). He is impressed by her waves of dark hair and the glitter of her eyes, and he supposes he would be impressed by the sharp curvaceous cut of her figure, too, were he...drawn to that sort of thing.

"Santana," breathes the blonde, and she bounds to her, clutching at her hands, her hips. The graverobber girl called Santana holds the zydrate just out of her reach, but kisses her, beautifully sculpted lips mashing together in something that looks like passion and hunger and scorn all at once, somehow.

"Wait your turn," says Santana, like she's speaking to a small child, or a dog. "You know how it goes. Highest bidder gets first cut. Come on, babies."

The boy with the mohawk shoots out, three or four cards of credits flickering in his hand already, and the others heave forward too, scrabbling at her coat. Only one other person from the party hangs back, and Kurt, glad to see he's not alone, takes a moment to study on him.

Oh.

His breath hitches in his throat; this boy is exquisite. Kurt has barely begun to catalogue everything that is right about him, from the drape of his clothing to the white straightness of his teeth, when he speaks.

"Oh, wow, good, are you new here too?"

Kurt gapes like a fish, then catches himself and replies. "New here...yes." He's planned to lie this whole evening but finds he can't help but tell the truth to this boy, this masterpiece. "I'm actually new - everywhere...."

The boy breathes out a sigh and rolls bright, hazel-brown eyes. "Yes, me too. Would you believe me, I'm seventeen and I've never had a surgery before in my life?"

"Never?" Kurt blurts out before he can stop himself.

The other boy squints a little at him, and his tone hardens. "Well yeah, what do you mean?"

Kurt is astounded. So all of this...this is natural genetics? He looks harder at him - how? How does he have those cutting-edge dark curls, even thicker and wilder than Santana's, so flawlessly in vogue? How is the curvature of his neck, his shoulders, the muscle in his arms crafted into such an enviable shape by birth alone? Six-figure stars would pay five-figure prices to be sculpted like this. This boy is...he's unreal, is what he is. He is why they invented surgery - not to do anything to people like this, but to do things to other people so they can look like this.

"I just," he finally says, "it's - you look - cultivated." He can feel his traitorous blood rushing into the too-hot skin of his cheeks. "Very nicely cultivated."

He grins at Kurt, swaying a little on the balls of his feet. "Well, thanks, I guess?" And he extends a hand, decorum where the mohawk-boy had none, and says, "Blaine."

Kurt reaches out to shake it and thrills at its tender roughness. "Kurt." Not a fake name. Not lying. Not to him.

"Hey, whoa, what happened to your arm?" Because Blaine (Blaine) pulls his hand back decorated with a smear of blood, and Kurt looks down and sees that his wrist has leaked and trickled across his palm. Shit.

"It's nothing," he tries to say, but Blaine takes him by the arm, pushes back the sleeve of his sweater, and unwinds the scarf, and then suddenly his exquisitely coarse fingers are touching smooth, so smooth at Kurt's own skin and he can't take it, the nerves of his wrist and the muscles of his heart conspire against him and he starts to panic, because as Blaine is saying I have some ointment for this I think and reaching into the deep pocket of his jacket, Kurt is starting to fall in love.

iv.
There is not much surgery, Kurt realizes, that he truly wants. There are things he'd like to have done, a trendier texture to his hair, fuller and rounder in the lips or shoulders, but the one thing he is truly itching for, that he feels sometimes he would claw himself apart for, is the Pavissime Moonstone-line skin graft as worn by Kenton LaRoux. Blaine, he finds, is much the same way, and Kurt is barely surprised. There is absolutely nothing that needs fixing about his skin, or his shape, or the highest-of-high-fashion angles of his jaw and his cheekbones, the part of him Kurt finds it easiest to stare at. But Blaine, in a way that almost makes Kurt laugh (and what a concept, he realizes, laughing for the first time in so long), Blaine just wants to be taller. Kurt barely notices his height at first; Kurt isn't quite that tall himself, though he's well within popular trends. But he can see how, next to the mohawk boy (Puck, he learns) or the blonde girl who curls herself at Santana's feet (Brittany), how he might ache for it all the same.

So as such, neither of them get anything done on their first night in Santana's den. But she refuses to let them leave without shooting up their first helpings of zydrate.

Blaine goes first, and Kurt dares to let himself believe that it's because he senses Kurt's uneasiness. He shivers as Santana runs the tip of the gun across his bare chest, and then she flicks the trigger against his collarbone and turns the gun on Kurt before he can react. Kurt can see why he trembled; the gunmetal is ice cold against the skin of his stomach. She injects at his hip and he, too, drops against the wall.

Zydrate.

Kurt's eyes roll in his head and he thinks, suddenly, that none of him will ever be sharp again. Everything within him is loose, pliable, bending or curving, tipping this way or that way, like he's been made of neon-blue electric string to be braided here or severed there. He can't direct his eyes properly. He is utterly lazy. He wants to curl and writhe against something, the wall, the floor, the boy at his side -

Blaine.

They drag their faces together somehow, and Kurt can see that Blaine is grinning wide and boneless at him, one hand twisting faintly into his own hair. Kurt realizes his own face is probably stretched with a similar expression, and if he could bring himself to feel anything but amazing, hot liquidy pressure bubbling up through his taut muscles until he's limp like a bowstring snapped, he'd probably be utterly ashamed. On his awful, insufficient face it most likely makes him look like a disastrous clown. But on Blaine's face it's perfect.

Kurt is so happy. Kurt is so happy to let his head loll on his neck. Kurt is so happy to dumbly unfold his legs from underneath him. Kurt is so happy to fall into Blaine, rag-doll dead on top of him, and so happy to roll them over and over across the concrete floor. Blaine on top. Kurt on top. Blaine on top. Again and again, two euphoric spineless puppies with their fields of vision tinted bright flickering blue.

When they come down they're embarrassed, but not cripplingly so. Blaine keeps smiling his amazing smile, even when Santana kicks them out.

"Should I...walk you home?" he asks, tentative and sweet. Poor boy - he doesn't understand that everything is wrong with that.

"It's too far to walk," Kurt tells him instead. "I'll take the bus."

"Well, at least give me your information, to contact you on the link-up," says Blaine. "Yeah?"

Kurt tenses, and his wrist aches. The zydrate leaves him too tense already. "I can't," he says, "I - I don't have one."

"What?" Blaine laughs. "Everyone has a link-up, come on." A little flicker of pause. "Don't play hard to get with me."

Kurt's traitorous heart thuds hard inside his ribcage again. Maybe there is more surgery he needs to get, after all. "No, it's my father," says Kurt, and it isn't quite a lie, is it. "Really."

"Well, okay," says Blaine. He looks a little hurt and Kurt tenses harder with a fierce urge to wipe the hurt away. Blaine's features are too lovely for any nasty emotion to mar them like this. "But you'll come back?"

"Oh, absolutely," says Kurt, and he's dead serious this time. "I need that Moonstone graft."

"You don't...need it," says Blaine, shuffling. "Your skin is - it's wonderful."

Kurt kisses him, trying to memorize the shape of his jaw in Kurt's hand or his picture-perfect teeth under Kurt's tongue. Blaine grins. Kurt doesn't grin, but he does climb onto the bus.

v.
Kurt is back home and in his bed before his father awakens for work the next morning, and it is this way for two weeks. Kurt will leave all night, to Santana, to Blaine, to the world he feels almost instantly connected with. As long as he's in the house he slips the curfew bracelet back on. His father, distracted by his work and so eager to believe that Kurt is all right, doesn't notice.

Santana makes them watch a street surgery. Phase two of your initiation, she says, grinning her tailor-made full-lipped snake grin, and planting them in front of the wide, grimy window to an underground operating theater. The surgeon Zs up a girl who looks even younger than Kurt and completely redoes her from the neck up, pulls the pout out of her lips, widens her Oriental eyes, re-invents her hair for her like he's playing God. She looks like she's awake through the entire thing, even with bright hot blood gushing from her eyes, and if Kurt didn't remember so well the swelling, stupid-happy feeling of zydrate running through him it would chill him to the bone that she can just sit there.

He's a good surgeon, but pricy. She'll be on payments, but she comes away from it breathing deeper and fuller as though life is fresh and new again. It's a feeling Kurt longs for even deep within parts of him he knows he'll never change.

"It's like my grandparents from the beginning of the twenty-first century would say," the girl (Kurt finally hears her called Tina) says to them after - "about like, tattoos or piercings or something. How once they got it and felt it, it was like it was always supposed to be a part of them. These are my lips, you know? They are my eyes. My soul can feel it. And in seven months of payments my purse will feel it too."

Kurt imagines this feeling with his skin graft, and finds it's not that hard to process at all.

He asks Blaine about it, one night, as they're walking to the bus stop together hand in hand. Blaine bites his lip a little, staring upward like he does when he's thinking too hard, and then gives a small and noncommittal shrug.

"I guess I'm just doing things because I want to," he says. Kurt slides his hand up the wiry solidness of Blaine's forearm, once, twice. "If it feels good, then I keep doing it, you know?"

"Do I feel good?" says Kurt, distant.

"Baby," says Blaine, "you feel amazing." He kisses Kurt, deeply, indecently, nearly frotting on him where they stand. Kurt, helpless, reciprocates.

At home, he studies on himself in the mirror, and tries to find what parts of him could possibly feel amazing to his boyfriend. He thinks that Blaine cannot truly have the heart of an artist, or he would strive for perfection in everything - but then, Blaine has been perfect for so long, maybe he doesn't know how.

At home, Kurt has to start sleeping while his father is out working, because his nights are consumed by Santana, by Blaine, by the world he longs for the way Tina longed for her lips, the way Kurt still longs for the very skin he has been created to live in.

vi.
A month to the day after their first kiss, Blaine gets his surgery.

Kurt goes with him to the same surgeon who worked on Tina, and holds his hand and kisses his eyes and strokes the small of his back right up until he has to go into the theater. They'll have to do a slight elongation on his torso and break both his legs to stretch him out the three and a half inches that he wants. Kurt is torn between flinching away as they take his baby apart and watching with rapt fascination as Blaine is born anew. Santana lingers in the doorway, talking and touching with Brittany, and laughs at him whenever he quivers. Kurt rubs at the sore spots where he severed the bracelet from his wrist.

During a part that he can't watch, he makes up his mind; spurred by Blaine's transformation he turns to the graverobber. "I want the Pavissime Moonstone-line skin graft. I - I don't just want it. It wants me."

She pries her face from Brittany's neck, her smile fading. "All-over? That procedure's fucking ridiculous," she says. "I only got one doctor'll do that for you and it's gonna cost you crazy."

"How much?" says Kurt, unflinching.

She rattles off a steep, intimidating figure. Kurt's been saving everything he can since his desperation began but it can't quite reach that far. (And Kurt remembers his promise to his father. This will not be financed.)

But he says, "Very well," and turns back to Blaine through the window. He grins zydrate-giddy out at Kurt, even as a whirring saw tears into his left leg. Kurt smiles back as best he can, but after a few minutes he looks away again and sinks into his newest magazine instead. Sweet Amber Largo grins out at him with blinding-white teeth shaped into sharp points in the front, her taut legs spread around the headline Craziest Creations of the GeneCo Season! One of the photos on the spread inside shows her biting her own brother's throat until it bleeds. (Kurt has a suddenly hilarious image of Sweet Amber as a shark.) But the brother, Luigi, seems to have been doing well for himself lately. There's a small blurb with an image of his X-ray, and it's stunning, his spinal column in particular.

Kurt thinks about his own spinal column. Kurt thinks about looking at himself in the mirror at his father's house, twisting and contorting and finding everything that's wrong. But Kurt thinks about the glow of Blaine's hazel-brown eyes, shining from the inside every time Kurt so much as breathes, and almost finds himself caring a bit less. Blaine doesn't need him to have a sexier body-scan. Blaine is crazy enough, blind or stupid or uncaring enough, to take him flawed like he is right now. (Maybe perfect people just do that.) Blaine is -

Coming out the door, heaving heavy on crutches. Blaine is - taller. Kurt has to look up to look him in the eye, which is new and surreal and...strangely sexy. The zydrate has clearly had its way with him but he looks like he's doing all right, and Kurt comes to stand right in front of him, smiles at him, kisses him (rocking up on tiptoe, because Blaine is taller).

"Hey, beautiful," says Blaine, grinning weakly. "Turns out I'm O-positive. Who knew."

A pleased little gasp leaves Kurt's lips. "Me too."

"Okay," the surgeon says from behind Blaine, flicking through a clipboard stocked with transparencies, "so your first three installments are out of the way, that's great, we'll just need eight more before you're done and you're free to pay as many at once as you like as long as you're never out by..."

Kurt doesn't hear the rest.

Blaine is on a plan. Blaine is on a plan. The boy he loves, caught in the trap of industry and consumerism and Kurt's well-meaning, work-dedicated father.

"Why didn't you tell me you couldn't pay all at once," Kurt says on the rush of an exhale, suddenly tense with dread, searching his boyfriend's face for something, anything that would possibly indicate that he understands how serious and awful this is. Anything to indicate that he knows what Kurt's insides are doing, how his inadequate stomach lurches and drops, his inadequate lungs shorten and harshen his breath, because it was bad enough for Kurt's traitorous heart to fall in love with this boy. He can't bear for it to end up broken, too.

"Relax," he says instead, which just serves to make Kurt relaxing impossible. "I make good pay and I rarely spend on anything else but food and my place. I've got this."

He leans down (leans down, and why does Kurt respond so viscerally to being the smaller one?) and presses a mindmelting kiss to Kurt's lips, and very, terribly briefly, Kurt believes him.

vii.
"Got your birthday comin' up in a month or so, buddy," says his father, one night while they're eating dinner. He smiles around a mouthful, and Kurt tries not to scrape his plate with his fork too badly as he picks weakly at the food.

"I guess, yeah," says Kurt.

"Seventeen years old. Gosh, it's like yesterday you fit in my arms, you know?"

"Mmm."

His father's brow creases a little but he makes nothing of it. "Any ideas about what you might like to get this year?"

Kurt's fork freezes against the plate. He has eight-fifty saved up under his mattress along with his magazines and the strip of four condoms Puck smirkingly gave him a few nights ago. He'll need at least eleven-seventy-five for the graft. Is there a way he could...?

"Well, I don't know, Dad, you've never been the world's greatest shopper!" He tries to laugh at his own joke, but Kurt and his father both see through how forced it is. The glance they share is uneasy. "It might work better if you just - just gave me some credits, you know, and let me get something for myself, that I really want?"

"Yeah," says Burt after several strained moments. "Maybe."

Kurt's dinner sits heavy in his stomach, and he gets the feeling that he's just ruined all his chances.

Three nights later Blaine is finally off the crutches. He walks a bit unsteadily, but that just means he has to lean on Kurt even more, and Kurt would be stupid to complain. They fall in with Brittany, and Puck, and the angry, enormous girl named Lauren who's there sometimes, each surgery she affords taking her one step closer to her dream of an appealing figure. But when they reach Santana, there's a tall lanky boy hunched over against her, crying, to an almost embarrassing degree. Santana isn't exactly comforting him but Kurt feels like she probably doesn't know how.

"What is it?" asks Brittany, her voice meek even as she wafts to Santana like filings to a magnet.

"Fucking repo men," she says. "They got Tina."

The mention of her name sends a fresh round of sobs through the boy, whom Kurt can now see is Asian too - a brother? a lover? - and Brittany goes to comfort him too, doing a bit better of a job than Santana was but still not making much headway. Lauren swears softly, and Puck's juiced-up muscles roll under his skin as if he's anxious to punch something. In Kurt's mind, however, there is only one thought. His hand in Blaine's tightens fiercely and he can almost feel the veins of him, blood swishing through just under his skin, blood that could so easily be -

"You've got - got your payments under control, right?" He has to swallow, and resists the temptation to reach up and touch his pitiful throat.

Blaine squeezes back, and bumps their shoulders together, smiling. "Yep. All under control. Absolutely." Kurt looks up to look him in the eye, but he's still staring at the sobbing boy folded in Brittany's arms, and Kurt supposes he can't blame him.

Everyone takes a long, hard hit of zydrate in Tina's memory. The new boy - her boyfriend, it turns out, Mike - finally stops crying, long enough to say some sweet (though nonsensical) words about her lust for life and her really good oral sex. Kurt laughs, and laughs, and flicks his eyes to Blaine, laughing and laughing beside him. And when the Z wears off he feels horrible for laughing, and yet better a little, that he was still able to at all.

"Oh, Hummel," says Santana, "I talked to Dr. S about that graft you're into. Twelve-hundred even, and probably not likely to go much higher than that, so that's a fuckin' steal."

Kurt hisses through his teeth. Twelve is a lot. But for an all-over designer graft it's absolutely incredible, especially if the price is set so solidly. He has eight-seventy under his mattress. If he goes zydrate-free for a couple of weeks he can save a little bit more. He just...it's very unlikely that he will make it to twelve. Not soon enough, anyway. The Moonstone is limited-edition, for one; and the longer Kurt waits, the more his own skin starts to itch and burn when he's in it, out of wrongness. He needs sleep, or zydrate, or that fucking graft.

"Isn't your birthday coming up?" asks Blaine. He chuckles at the face Kurt makes. "Look, see, I did remember. I listen when you talk sometimes, you know?"

"I appreciate all your effort," says Kurt acidly, though he's grinning.

"No but hey, listen, I can get you two-fifty for that if you can get yourself the rest of the way there," he says. "As a present. Gotta do something nice for my man, after all."

Kurt purses his lips. So much of him is just aching and dying to say yes, to adore his boyfriend, to take his generosity and use it to transform into himself. But there goes Kurt's miserable heart, thumping and pining away, and reminding his brain to remind him that Blaine still has payments to make for his legs and everything. To remind him that Mike's twitching around the eyes like he might start weeping again, and around the fingers like he might tug at Santana's thick coat and beg her for another shot. And Kurt really needs to get that fool organ looked at.

"No, no," he tells him. "You - keep your money." And before Blaine can argue, Kurt occupies his mouth with his own.

In the end, it is Kurt's birthday present to himself. The night before, his father is asleep, like always, and Kurt sneaks awake, like always. But tonight he has a special goal in mind before he leaves.

Kurt's graft will be extreme. Literally impossible to miss or ignore. Once he gets it, he can't come back to his father's house, because he will know, and everything will disintegrate utterly. So here he is, in his father's workshop, breaking into his desk, finding the key to the safebox, breaking into the cabinet, unlocking the box, and stealing from him the last three hundred he needs to become whole again.

He stands in the center of the workshop, and thinks of Tina, and has a remarkably easy time leaving it all behind.

By that night Blaine is walking fine, and they grin and bounce to the surgeon's together. Right before he goes under, Blaine tells him he can stay at his place that night, and forever if he needs to. The tonight especially is underscored with something more, and Kurt's last thought before the zydrate rocks his world - a ridiculously heavy dose since it's to cover so much surface area, so thick that it leaves him reeling and barely-conscious with his joy - is how great it's ended up being, to turn seventeen.

viii.
His eyes are rolling and he's smiling and most of what he smells is blood.

What in Hell's name are you doing, screams the surgeon at a honey-blond gentern, he's practically lucid over here!

He drifts in and out and laughs at the tall woman doctor and cannot really feel his face.

Hardest part's over, shouts one gentern at another, but for fuck's sakes keep moving!

He rocks up a little and curves over and vomits and it might be from pain he thinks but god he's just so happy.

Get out of here, you idiot! screams the chubby black gentern as the blonde one and the surgeon staunch his bleeding, we seriously cannot have any added stimulus for him!

All of him feels wonderful but all of him feels cold and his head spins in a fuzzy funny way as they sit him up.

"It's twelve-fifty," says Dr. Sylvester, and Blaine covers the rest.

ix.
Every breath Kurt takes is fresher, fuller, flawless, like it's bringing to him, somehow, so much more than air. He can't stop looking at it and he can't stop touching. He rolls up the sleeve to his crisp button-down and rubs the pad of his thumb hard into his opposite forearm (where the messy scars from his curfew cuff, all those months ago, are perfectly gone).

Everything feels like the beautiful harsh frost in the back of your throat when you drink something that's much too cold. Sweet, and icy, and almost good enough to hurt. In the flickering underground lights its color shifts hazily with his every movement, as he bends and rotates his arm at the elbow, every lowlight in the paler-than-pale of it shimmering out, snow and lightning, inside of him, part of him. It's so amazing that Kurt nearly wants to cry.

The sensation from his own tentative touches of admiration is nothing compared to Blaine's deliberate stroke of the spot between the hem of his shirt and the waistband of his jeans. "Wow, Kurt," he breathes into his ear, and even his breath is electrifying, all of it oversensitive from the fresh surgery and just so glisteningly right.

They race hand-in-hand to the best above-ground shopfront window they can find, and Kurt marvels at himself.

"The Pavissime Moonstone-line skin graft," he whispers, "as worn by Kenton LaRoux."

Even Kenton LaRoux, Kurt is convinced, couldn't wear it this well. He unbuttons his shirt and his vest in the front, letting them hang open so he can see how it hugs his trim solid chest, the curve of his ribcage and the flare out into his hips. God, it's fucking amazing. It moves and surges with him like it's so much more alive than his old skin, than that skin that wasn't his; and it's almost like everything wrong has been fixed, like his bell hips are thinner and squarer, his shoulders more trendily broad, the slope of his stomach the hottest of haute, now that it's all properly wrapped like it was always meant to be, frosty and tight-stretched and oh, just perfect. Perfect!

Oh, and with Blaine's voice dipping and growling like that, everything turns even colder. "Okay," he says, "you really better put your clothes back on, because we are still six blocks from my apartment, and I don't think I want anyone to see you like this but me." He paws at Kurt's hips and hovers behind him, and Kurt studies on them in the dim reflection. Blaine is a few inches taller than Kurt now, his hair still those wonderfully dark thick curls, and his skin darker too, warm and thick where his arms slip through Kurt's own. There's the sweet dip of his mouth, the straight-perfect line of his teeth, as he nips across Kurt's over-sensitive throat. He is solid where Kurt wisps, and straight where Kurt curves, and when they make eye contact through their reflections Kurt has never seen his eyes so dark. They can't make it quickly enough back to Blaine's door and through into his dim, cramped bedroom.

Blaine's kisses devour him, and Kurt, once scared of how this might one day turn out, suddenly feels it all nearly as rightly as he felt his true skin. Kurt loves Blaine. Kurt's love for Blaine has been strong and desperate-hungry almost since they first met, veins unpricked by the zydrate needles, bodies untouched by the scalpel blade. But Kurt doesn't say love, barely even feels love. Kurt does love. Kurt's world runs in the physical and, almost, the physical alone. Kurt knows sensual contours and sharp angles, knows the color and cut and coarseness that can make something incredible, just as flawlessly as he knows his thick collection of magazines - the one thing he brought with him from his father's house - like the back of his fresh-grafted hand. He loves Blaine for his jaw or his arms or the trim twist of his waist. Kurt can love with a kiss or a squeeze or a scrape of his short-clipped fingernails better than he can ever love from inside. And if they do this - if they do this, the most physical thing of all, and right on the night of Kurt's graft, when all the pieces of himself have finally, physically, come together as one - this will be the greatest love of all.

Blaine holds him close to his body around the waist with one hand while the other sweeps all across him and takes off his clothes. His vest hits the floor with a soft thud, his shirt an even softer one, and Blaine freezes for a moment to admire his full bare torso, gliding in and out of tone and shadow in the gloom of his apartment. Then his belt, shoes, socks, pants, and when Kurt has nothing on but his underwear Blaine throws him hard to his raggedy low-slung bed and pins him there with eyes rendered pitch-black in the dimness.

Kurt watches, transfixed, as Blaine reveals himself to him. His tattered outer shirt flips away, then the snug one underneath, and Kurt's panting, gasping for it, his shimmering new chest heaving just at the bottom of his vision, as his eyes trace over the perfect shape of Blaine's chest, his arms and shoulders, muscles tight and taut and hot, hotter than Kurt could ever have imagined. His jeans are so tight that they peel off slowly, and underneath is - nothing. Nothing but Blaine, still built as beautifully all over as follows from the rest of him, and jesus, if Kurt had known, if Kurt only knew there had been so little between him and this all day, before the graft, after the graft, and now...

When Blaine is naked he pounces on Kurt, arms holding him up sturdy on either side of Kurt's head as they kiss. Blaine's mouth is blistering hot against his own frostiness, as his eager tongue demands entrance to Kurt's mouth and Kurt yields as he has always done. Kurt's hands fist into Blaine's hair so he can tug that mouth harder onto him, stroking inside of it and then back into his own as their tongues tangle fierce and desperate, until Kurt's whole body is rolling and hitching beneath him and every press of the kiss jerks from him a fleeting hungry gasp.

Blaine slots their hips more solidly together, nothing but the flimsy barrier of Kurt's underwear separating his hard cock from Blaine's as they rock in tandem. The sensation is too much, Kurt's every nerve alight afresh from his surgery, and he wants to scream, wants to snatch at Blaine so hard it hurts him as much as this hurts Kurt, pain exquisite and divine. But Blaine is practically laughing into him, sliding their skin together and kissing him deep, languid, sinful, sucking loose at his tongue or harder on his lower lip, his stubbled jaw scrubbing past Kurt's own in a sandpaper freezerburn that finally drives Kurt over the edge, and he comes, straight into his own briefs like a stupid little boy, hips driving madly into Blaine as he clutches to the back of his neck and cries out sharp and broken.

And Blaine is laughing, and Kurt's so miserably embarrassed for the few moments before he realizes that Blaine isn't laughing at him. "Oh my god, I can't believe you're so amazing," he says, and he peels Kurt's underwear away, throwing them god-knows-where into the haze of his room and sliding down across Kurt's body slow, soft, the heels of his hands perfectly calloused against where the sides of Kurt's stomach are still shaking from his orgasm. "I was so scared, you know?" says Blaine, stroking him through it, nuzzling a little at his spent messy cock to regain its interest. "I was terrified, that after you came out with your new skin on, I wouldn't recognize you." He licks a stripe up the underside of Kurt's cock and Kurt's whole spine shivers; holy fuck, Blaine's got some of Kurt's come in his hair. "Or worse, I wouldn't like it. I tried to break into the theater, just to make sure they didn't fuck you up." (Kurt has a faint Z-memory of the black gentern, shouting get out!) "But oh - oh - " A moan that filthy on Blaine's honey-sweet voice feels almost like a physical caress against the inside of Kurt's thigh, and he's stirring, so definitely stirring. "When I saw you after you came out, once they'd sealed you off and cleaned you up and told me I could see you again - I can't believe I was already in love with you, and didn't just fall in love right then." His teeth nip teasingly at the other thigh, and his lips spread into a easy grin. "I can't believe I already wanted to sleep with you, and didn't just decide right then that I wanted to fucking nail you into this crappy mattress and then never let you go when we were done."

"Blaine," Kurt gasps, the first real word he's been able to manage since they've started, everything else just dying into tattered whines. Blaine's grin is one part evil to two parts genuine worship, and he starts with just his right hand, perfect-rough fingertips trailing feather-light down across Kurt's collarbone, just left of center down his chest, swirling all over his trembling stomach, over his hip, to curl lazily around his half-hard cock and stroke it smooth and slow a few times before dipping lower, lower, and twisting to let his thumb drag across the pucker of Kurt's hole.

"This graft is so perfect," says Blaine, stroking over and over until Kurt's hips roll in time with it. "They covered you absolutely everywhere, and you just shine. You fucking shine for me, Kurt."

Just when Kurt thinks he's going to shatter if he shakes any harder, his skin overalert, his muscles tied tense for too long, Blaine pulls his hand away, dripping something from a little vial across his fingers and then sliding it back and sliding it further and there it is, this is Blaine's finger inside Kurt's body. Kurt moans, thrusting onto it almost instantly, and Blaine just smiles and adds another. It hurts, it hurts so good just like his icy new skin, the two things Kurt has needed more strongly and more deeply than anything else in the world. Blaine stretches and stretches him, hot fingers inside and hot breath against his neck whispering about how he doesn't want to hurt him, how he wants to make him feel as amazing as he deserves to feel. Kurt just groans and snatches their mouths back together, kissing him as hard and heavy as he can, because Kurt does love.

Blaine's cock is thick and swollen for him (for him!) and Kurt's is pretty hard again too by the time Blaine finally pulls his slick fingers out. He tries to go slow, tries to be the gentleman, but Kurt doesn't let him. Kurt jolts his hips hard against Blaine and forces him all the way in, and it all but knocks the wind out of him, his hands scrabbling for purchase at Kurt's hips. Blaine is boiling, burning hot, working up a sweat even as Kurt pants and feels like he could almost see his breath. They roll up and up, Kurt nearly sitting in Blaine's lap with their legs akimbo, chest to chest, lips against each other's lips or ears or throats; or, once, just as he's about to come, Blaine mouths a messy earnest kiss straight into the palm of Kurt's hand, and shoots off inside of him, perfect muscles straining at his hot dark skin as they tense from the force of it, and his big stiff cock pistoning in and in and in until his momentum drags and rolls to a stop. With a few more hot kisses and the curve of Blaine's hand around his hand around his own cock, Kurt comes again, too, and when they disentangle, the temperature has almost reached some sort of equilibrium, at least enough for them to sleep.

Kurt hasn't slept at night for a long, long time, and never in the arms of the man he loves.

x.
He wakes around noon, twisted into sheets that smell like nothing more than Blaine and sex. Kurt lets a slow, satisfied smile play across his face as he rolls and stretches, but it drops quickly when he realizes that no one is in the bed with him. Instead there is a note, fashioned out of a mostly-white advertisement page from one of Kurt's magazines, that reads At work, back at 7. Love you. Kurt almost wants to get angry, that Blaine has ripped a page out, but he clutches its glossy finish between his shining new fingers, close to his chest, and lets the smile come back.

They're able to just be like this for a while. Blaine works, and Kurt lounges, sometimes fixing up the place. (Blaine has been a bachelor for certain, and not a very rich one either. Kurt makes the best of what he's got.) At night they leave, hand in hand, no sneaking at all, and visit Santana and the rest. Everyone down under the flickering lightbulb loves Kurt's new skin; Santana gives him his first shot of zydrate after the surgery on the house, she's so impressed. Brittany just wants to touch him, but Blaine doesn't let her get very far with that. He loves Kurt's new skin, too.

No one, of course, loves it as much as Kurt himself. He finds himself going out of his way to wander the streets in different lights, the haze of dusk or the neon of two AM, trying to take it all in. One day he sleeps very, very late, and when he wakes a beam of sunlight is slanting just so across the bed through Blaine's one tiny, high-set window. Kurt rolls into it, watching it glide over his glimmering arms and torso, and before he knows what's happening he's touching himself all over, stroking his fingertips hard into his flesh so it ripples and changes. Blaine comes home from work early and finds him in the middle of things, and just plucks his hands aside, dropping to his knees to finish the job with the hot bittersweetness of his mouth.

At the end of the month Blaine gets paid, and they celebrate with a day off, and dinner out at this divey restaurant up on the fourth or fifth floor of some grungy rise. As nasty as the place is, the food is wonderful, and Kurt loves the idea of being out with Blaine. He's never really been out so much in his life, and now here he is, sitting across the table from one of the most beautiful people he has ever seen. They share a slippery, fruity dessert of some kind and Blaine makes some indecent noises around Kurt's spoon. They attract attention. Kurt adores it.

The check is a little steep, and Kurt frowns as Blaine pays it almost too casually. "You've got this?" he says, looking nowhere but at the silver-white half-moons of his fingernails.

"I'm treating us," Blaine says with a smile. "I can't really expect you to pay for yourself, can I?"

"And you'll still have enough for the rest of the month, and for your installment on your surgery?"

"Sure, sure," says Blaine, deflecting the flirtatious advances of the waitress by curling one hand smooth around Kurt's own. The smile on his face isn't even as deep as the one in his dark eyes, and Kurt smiles a little too.

One night he steps out of the shower to find Blaine sprawled on the bed, paging through one of his magazines. Kurt would almost be a little upset that Blaine decided to wait his turn rather than just joining him, but it's rare any more that he gets a chance to just observe Blaine unnoticed. He's settled better into his longer legs now, thinks Kurt, the way they curve across the mess of sheets, and his hair is getting a little long but it's more luxurious than ever. People would kill for hair like that, or pay ridiculous amounts of money anyway. Other styles are...shifting, though. The set of Blaine's hips is a little too square and narrow for popular trends any more, and his skin's getting a little dark. He should probably start shaving closer. He really isn't perfect after all.

Oh, but Kurt is in love with him, and Kurt would take his imperfection over a thousand glossy magazines. Because Kurt isn't perfect, either, and Blaine still loves him. And maybe they don't need to be perfect, in the end.

Blaine spots him hovering and looks up, smiling wide. He clambers out of the bed and to the tiny bathroom, bumping Kurt deliberately as he passes. Kurt smiles fondly, and sits at the edge of the bed to tug on a pair of Blaine's pajama pants. The magazine's been left open - it's actually a really old issue, the spread of designers' pick eyes on the left have all been out for ages. But buried in the articles on the right, Kurt sees one that catches him: 'You Have My Heart!' The Depths of Shilo Wallace Spitz's Love!

There's a small picture of Shilo Wallace Spitz and London Spitz, shoulder-to-shoulder, holding each other's hands and using their free hands to tug down the collars of their shirts and reveal matching surgical scars. Shilo looks a bit embarrassed at exposing the upper curve of her breast, but it's a cute, admirable embarrassed; she never does anything that isn't lovely and wonderful, it's kind of sickening. Next to them, the article goes on to talk about how the newlyweds discovered early on that they had the same blood type, and were so in love with love that they got the surgery - Shilo's first and only to date - to put her heart into London, and vice versa. The article quotes her: "We beat as one."

Kurt has a fleeting memory: "Turns out I'm O-positive. Who knew."

His eyes drift to the bathroom door, and his hand drifts faintly to his chest, to the place where he can feel his hot heartbeat under his cold skin.

xi.
The problem is, of course, that they're broke.

Though Kurt hasn't been home for nearly six weeks, he still finds his tiny allowance swelling up into his account like clockwork, some vague faint proof that his father still loves him after it all. It's reassuring, and helpful, but it isn't enough for him to supplant the expenses that come from living on his own with his boyfriend. This isn't like when he would sneak onto the net and order magazine subscriptions or high-end waistcoats every once in a while. This is food, electricity, water. Soon enough it will be heat for the winter. And sooner than that it will be surgery.

Because now the idea is in his head, unfortunately. Kurt isn't quite so far over it that he can't remember the itching, burning feeling, the incompleteness, from before he had his skin. He knows what it was like to ache with desperation, something greater than wanting, a need, a fire, the exact feeling he feels now in split-second flashes here and there if Blaine should happen to climb over him in their bed and press them chest-to-chest, their hearts beating madly at one another through a barrier so thin and yet so impossibly thick all at once. Kurt realizes he has never quite been satisfied with his heart, from the moment it nearly gave out when he sliced himself free of his curfew, or the moment it decided to fall in love regardless of what Kurt's common sense was saying. He knows he is meant to have another one, now. And that other one is meant to be Blaine's.

But they can't afford a surgery. They can barely afford the zydrate, that blue-blitz freedom Kurt needs at night after spending all day stress-tense about the money, the money, it's always the money.

"Just one hit, please Santana," he gasps. He can see the vial fluttering in her fingertips, and she slams it home into the gun (like a battery, battery hums Kurt's childhood subconscious wildly, the singsong everyone learns) but chuckles darkly at him like he's stupid.

"For that? For that I can let you fuckin' lick the outside of the glass."

"We're saving," says Blaine, "for something that we want," and if Kurt weren't so transfixed by the luminescence of the Z he would shoot Blaine a glare, because how can he say want so carelessly, doesn't it downright burn him from the inside out?

"This ain't a charity case, boys," she says. "I got a job to do. You can't pay with money, you pay somehow."

"I don't have a job," says Kurt, "I'm underage, and no one's hiring - "

"Not my problem."

"Dammit, Santana - "

"Watch your language with me, bitch!"

"Don't tell him what to do!"

"I don't need you to stand up for me!"

"Well you sure need me to do everything else for you!"

"Jesus Christ, Blaine - "

"You guys want the heart swap, right?" says Brittany, her dull, soft voice cutting through their edginess with an ease way sharper than its bluntness should allow for. Kurt realizes he's been yelling at Blaine and cringes, curling harder on himself. If he could just get that fucking zydrate none of this would be happening.

"Y-yeah," says Blaine, and Kurt can much of the same on his voice, too.

"Oh, well, I'll pay for it if you'll have sex with me."

Blaine and Kurt freeze, staring at one another, because...what?

"I've got the money, my dad just died," she says. "And usually I do it the other way around, but - you're so hot. Especially now that you're tall."

Kurt shifts closer to Blaine, some misguided attempt at protection. "No. No way. He is my boyfriend."

"I'm not your property."

"Oh, you want to have sex with her?"

"No!" says Blaine. "I mean - nothing against you, B, but I'm strictly boys-only. I don't - I probably couldn't, even." Kurt smiles, and hates himself a little for being so smug. "But..."

"But?" says Kurt.

"But?" Brittany echoes.

"But I...I know how pretty you think Kurt's skin is," he says, and suddenly his rough-soft fingertips are coasting deliciously across the back of Kurt's neck, and he shudders even with the rest of them around. "It's so pretty, Brittany. And I know all the best ways to make it..." Blaine's lips latch around the pocket of skin just behind Kurt's ear, and he sucks hard, and it's so slow and deliberate and ridiculous that Kurt feels some of the withdrawal tension leak out of him almost like he's been punctured. He doesn't even need to finish his sentence.

"Mm-hmmmmmm," moans Brittany, staring.

"So if you like," he says, " - and with, ah, with a little contribution from Madam Graverobber, if you please - we could maybe...put on a little show. I just don't think it'll work out if you participate."

Kurt aches - he needs the zydrate, needs the surgery, needs this to not be happening right now. Kurt aches down to his core with his need to not be having sex in front of other people for money. Because he's certain that counts as prostitution somewhere along the line, but with the twitch his limbs pick up staring at the vial in Santana's gun combined with the twitch all through his glistening skin when Blaine touches him like that he is shaking, shaking much too hard to not try to do something to make it stop.

He kisses Blaine full on the mouth and Blaine moans, rocking their hips together. Over Kurt's shoulder he shoots Santana an expectant look, and she comes to them and shoots them both in the smalls of their backs.

"Baby," Blaine says lazily, touching him everywhere, "you feel so fucking amazing."

Baby, you feel amazing, says the Blaine in Kurt's memory, the Blaine who just does things because they feel good, but as the zydrate kicks in, sending Kurt's veins swimming with slack luxury, he can't blame him, because everything about the way Blaine pins him sloppily to the wall of Santana's underground den feels so, so wonderful.

xii.
They lie in the theater together on adjacent beds. The zydrate is crawling its way out of Kurt's system and he winces, and when he sees the long straight scar across the precious skin of his chest he winces further. Were it any other procedure the thick line wouldn't be worth it. But as his head clears, Kurt can hold his breath and listen close and hear it, the heart that has been his for so long finally right inside his body where it belongs.

Blaine reaches out a hand across the space between them and their fingers tangle together. Kurt squeezes tight, tighter, tight enough to feel the blood pulse through him, and thinks to himself, it's doing a much better job inside of you than it did inside of me. His poor, inadequate heart, trying so hard but never doing what it was meant, and all this time it's because it was trapped inside Kurt's own chest where it didn't belong. Across the space between their beds, across this last divide, it's finally free, to throb and thrive and do what it was born to. And inside Kurt the new heart does the same, his blood seeming hotter and colder all at once as it thrills through him. Kurt wonders who it was, who first figured out that it was the heart where love comes from.

"We're just like the Spitzes now," Blaine jokes faintly, through a straining smile that tugs tighter as Kurt watches the zydrate leak out of it. "Just like the beautiful people."

Kurt sits suddenly upright and tugs Blaine to him, until they're both in one bed and they can wrap so seamlessly as to feel their hearts beating together against one another, and damn if they aren't flawlessly in synch, too, keeping each other's time. "We are the beautiful people," he hisses fiercely. Kurt has never felt so complete, nor so completely in love.

The surgeon finds them locked that way when he comes back in to check up. "Good, you both seem to be doing splendidly," he says, flipping through his clipboard. "The nice young lady outside has taken care of the entire bill, you two should be very thankful to her. So Mr. H., you're squared away completely, and Mr. A., it hurts me to do it but I feel obligated to inform you that you're becoming dangerously delinquent on the payments for my last operation with you, and after a certain amount of time I am required to report you to - "

"What," breathes Kurt, looking Blaine square in the eye the best he can through the hot half-inch of air between their faces. "What?"

"I..." Blaine starts, but he gets nowhere. Kurt can see the flickering panic at the corners of his mouth, and more than anything can feel the butterfly increase of his heart, his heart, thudding inside his boyfriend's chest.

"You said," says Kurt, his mouth already twisting in time to the watering of his eyes, he is going to cry, isn't he, and he never cries. "You said you had it under control. You told me you were fine."

"I do have it under control!" says Blaine, even as he pulls away, and Kurt knows he's trying to keep him from noticing his rapid new heartbeat but Kurt can still feel it because that is his heart. He can still feel it lying to him.

"You don't!" says Kurt. "How could you - why did you even do this? How could you possibly sit through another surgery when you haven't even finished paying for the first one yet?"

"Because you needed it!" shouts Blaine, and his voice is so much louder and harsher than Kurt has ever heard that he stops, freezes. "You burnt for it from the inside out, every time we touched," he says. "And I am powerless against you. I have been from the start."

"Gentlemen," cautions the surgeon, but he is another world away. Kurt just keeps staring into Blaine's eyes, wide and frantic and desperate, and they are full of nothing but love and Kurt is ruined. He is furious, wants to be furious, but Blaine's heart inside of him knows how to feel so deeply, and coupled with his own mind, Kurt knows there is nothing to be done.

They have no money. A repo man will come for Blaine, and until then, they can do nothing but love each other and hope for something good.

Blaine doesn't go to work. What's the use? Brittany says Kurt can come and live with her, if he has to, and Kurt does his best not to weep openly right in front of her, because he wants to hate her for everything but she is just so nice, even as she ruts at Santana and shoots flicker-blue zydrate into her throat. After a while, they don't even leave the apartment.

Kurt makes love to Blaine, sliding hard and slow inside of him and holding him close, skin-to-skin in as wide an expanse as they can get. Kurt wants to absorb all of Blaine up inside of him, curl his lover into his heart that beats inside Kurt's chest and never let him go. Blaine hitches and laughs from the pleasure of it all, and it is the only time they laugh, any more. When they sleep Kurt hooks his arm tight around Blaine's waist, and it is tense from his desperate futile protection, and even tenser from two weeks without Z.

They are kissing languidly, weak sad smiles of resignation on their pressing lips, when someone kicks down Blaine's door. They're snatching at each other, touching everything they can for the last time, when Kurt freezes even tauter and swivels around because he recognizes those footfalls.

"Dad?"

The repo man in the doorway stills, and reaches up to wrench off his mask. "Kurt?"

Across the dark of their bedroom, Kurt makes eye contact with none other than his father, and it is within that one glance that absolutely everything happens.

xiii.
There are three bracelets clipped harsh into the skin of Kurt's right wrist, digging into the snow and lightning and everything that sits just under the surface, that all seems to have fizzled to impotence, any more. They catch at the edges of the pages of the magazine that he isn't really reading, so transfixed is he by the world outside his window, the whirling frantic real world he can only glimpse through thick bars and thicker memories.

Kurt wonders where Blaine is now. He wonders where he ran to, whom he ran to, Brittany, Mike, Santana, when his father let him go free in exchange for the repossession of his only son. He wonders how far Blaine has made it, how far he will make it until he turns up on someone's radar once again, and they realize he has evaded them, this time, out of the kindness of Burt Hummel's deep and adequate heart.

The issue in front of him is tattered and worn from the oil of his fingers, curled from the hotness of his breath against it. The same one he has read over and over again, The Depths of Shilo Wallace Spitz's Love!

Kurt wonders if he will feel it, out there, the moment his heart stops beating.